Most Athletic

Season 1 Episode 40

³The angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “It is true that you are unable to conceive and have no children, but you will conceive and give birth to a son. ⁴Now please be careful not to drink wine or beer, or to eat anything unclean; ⁵for indeed, you will conceive and give birth to a son. You must never cut his hair, because the boy will be a Nazirite to God from birth, and he will begin to save Israel from the power of the Philistines.” Judges 13:3-5 CSB

The Bible doesn't mention any of our modern sports—it might not mention sports at all, but that doesn't mean there weren't athletic people in Biblical times. The more I read the story of Samson, the more I see Samson in the athletes of today. I found myself having more sympathy for him. Let's talk about vulnerability, strength, and compassion.

References and Footnotes

Jeannette Catsoulis. "‘Brian Banks’ Review: Falsely Accused, and Fighting Back". New York Times. August 8, 2019

"Report: Wife caught Kobe cheating". FOX Sports. December 18, 2011

Lindsay Gibbs. "The legacy of the Kobe Bryant rape case". Think Progress. April 13, 2016

Jill Mahoney. "Chronology of the Tiger Woods scandal". The Globe and Mail. December 8, 2009

William D. Cohen. Remembering (and Misremembering) the Duke Lacrosse Case". Vanity Fair. March 10, 2016

The Overachiever

Season 1 Episode 38

When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceably to him. Genesis 36:4 CSB

We all know that person who seemed to overachieve at everything (maybe we ever were/are that person). For some reason, these people tend to get under our skin, which makes the story of Joseph that much more relatable. Let's talk about both sides of Joseph's story and see what we can learn about ourselves.

Most Likely To Betray You

Season 1 Episode 35

³Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned, was full of remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. ⁴“I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” he said.

“What’s that to us?” they said. “See to it yourself!” ⁵So he threw the silver into the temple and departed. Then he went and hanged himself. Matthew 27:3-5 CSB

Betrayal is always unexpected, and it always hurts. The Bible has many instances of betrayal, from sibling rivalries to Judas betraying Jesus. We spend a lot of time talking about the person who was betrayed and vilifying the betrayer, but what happens when we realize we have plenty in common the betrayer? The root cause of betrayal is always selfishness and we all fall prey to the temptation of selfishness. In this episode, let's talk about how we can avoid the pitfalls that lead to betrayal.

References and Footnotes

Another example of betrayal in the Bible is David's betrayal of Uriah (sleeping with Bathsheba then having Uriah killed).

Most Likely To Get You In Trouble

Season 1 Episode 32

²⁰Jesus entered a house, and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat. ²¹When his family heard this, they set out to restrain him, because they said, “He’s out of his mind.” ²²The scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and, “He drives out demons by the ruler of the demons.” ²³So he summoned them and spoke to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? ²⁴If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. ²⁶And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand but is finished. ²⁷But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house. ²⁸“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for all sins and whatever blasphemies they utter. ²⁹But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— ³⁰because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.” Mark 3:20-30 CSB

The Pharisees stayed trying to "catch" Jesus. They were against Him, in favor of their own traditions and the status quo (which gave them power). The were so engrossed in trying to harm Jesus, they erred close to the only unforgivable sin. Following in their footsteps is a guaranteed way to get us into trouble. Let's look at how their actions look in our modern world and talk about the dangers of calling good evil and evil good.

References and Footnotes

Yes, that's Bubbles speaking in the background. I had been gone all day and she wanted some attention. Of course she may have also been trying to tell us something about the Word 🤷🏽‍♀️

Other gospel records of Mark 3:20-30: Matthew 12:22-32 and Luke 12:10

Not everyone who says Lord, Lord will get into the Kingdom of Heaven: Matthew 7:21

Sheep of a different fold: John 10:16

Most Likely to Shoot Their Shot

Season 1 Episode 30

⁵So Ruth said to her, “I will do everything you say.” ⁶She went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law had charged her to do. ⁷After Boaz ate, drank, and was in good spirits, he went to lie down at the end of the pile of barley, and she came secretly, uncovered his feet, and lay down.

⁸At midnight, Boaz was startled, turned over, and there lying at his feet was a woman! ⁹So he asked, “Who are you?”

“I am Ruth, your servant,” she replied. “Take me under your wing, for you are a family redeemer.”Ruth 3:5-9 CSB

The entrance to where I stayed in Belize
Photocredit: Unsplash.com/Tamarcus Brown

Is it proper for a woman to "shoot her shot"? My friends and I have been talking about dating almost nonstop for the past week and while I wish I'd just recorded our conversation, I had to let some of that conversation bleed over in to the podcast. So let's talk about Ruth basically asking Boaz to marry her...

Footnotes and References

Ronald L. Eisenberg. "Levirate Marriage". My Jewish Learning; visited August 2019

Christopher R. Smith. "Did Ruth seduce Boaz to get him to marry her? (Part 3)". Good Question Blog. February 20, 2013

Judah and Tamar - Genesis 38

Most Likely to Have Your Back

Can you imagine giving up everything you know to stand by someone who's not a blood relative? Actually can you imagine doing the same for a blood relative? Would you give up your career? Friends? Way of living? Basically, how far would you go to have someone's back?

Season 1 Episode 19

¹Don’t rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father, younger men as brothers, ²older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters with all purity. ³Support widows who are genuinely in need. ⁴But if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them learn to practice godliness toward their own family first and to repay their parents, for this pleases God. ⁵The widow who is truly in need and left all alone has put her hope in God and continues night and day in her petitions and prayers; ⁶however, she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives. ⁷Command this also, so that they will be above reproach. ⁸But if anyone does not provide for his own family, especially for his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. 1 Timothy 5:1-8 CSB

00:01:52	Hey guys! Welcome back to the PSALMS to God podcast. So today I want to talk about the person that is Most Likely to Have Your Back. This is the “ride or die” loyal friend that you know you can count on. Whatever is happening, they've got your back. They're going to help you get through it, and you know, I think that this is the person we all desire to have in our life. We may not be so good at being this person, but you can bet everybody wants this person in their life.
00:02:27	And I want to point out up front that when I say they having your back, I don't mean following you up. So there are... I'ma use an extreme. OK, let's say I got locked up and I was in jail. There are one or two reasons why I could be there—OK, technically they're three, but we’re not going to get into the third one because I feel like that's a whole podcast on its own, and that's you know false accusations and the system. And y’all already know, we be here all day talking about this, so we're going to ignore that one for the sake of this podcast and for the sake of time—but either I actually committed a crime or there's some law that is unjust and I've inadvertently broken it or I protested it. Think like the Civil Rights Movement: like, Rosa Parks getting arrested for sitting on the bus or a black person getting arrested for simply being present in a white only space. So, if I've been arrested because I legitimately broke a law, like I've done something that I should not have done, when I say this person has my back, sure they may come bail me out or they may come visit me in the prison and not bailed me out, but they're going to come to me, they're going to come find me, and they're also going to have the conversation with me about what happened that put me in that position. Like “Why did you commit this crime, you know better. What are you doing? What's going on? Why didn't you reach out to me to help you before you went and robbed the bank?”[1] You know, things like this. OK, but on the flip side, if I'm in jail because I was protesting some unjust law or something went down, I'm talking about the person that's in the cell with you. Like they went to the march with you. They got spat on with you. The whole nine yards. That's what I really mean when I say they have your back. Not somebody that's just like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, What my girl said.” I don't mean that person is just hyping you up and following along with foolishness, OK.
00:04:40	But like I said, we all desire this person in our life. Now, some of us might not be quite ready to handle the truth, so we might not necessarily want somebody who's real enough to check us when we're wrong, but we want somebody that we can count on, somebody that's reliable. And like I said is a little hard to actually be that reliable person, but the truth is if I'm expecting you to be that person for me, I need to be that person for you. Right? And for a while, there has been an issue that was I guess weighing on my heart that I've been thinking about over the years, for over a year, and trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future, and it deals with this issue of loyalty and having someone's back.
00:05:40	A couple of days ago the group chat that I'm with in the young adult group at my church, someone posed a question in reference to the rich man in the Bible that was told to sell all of his belongings and follow Jesus.[2] And we got into a discussion about what that looks like, whether we would be able to do that—like I said what it would look like in today's society and all of these things, and while the conversation kind of went in a slightly different direction than what we're going to talk about today, as I was talking in this conversation a lot of these ideas also started to formulate in my head because I realize this situation that I've been thinking about also falls into that category, in a way, of would I sell all of my belongings to have somebody's back per sé (and you'll understand why I'm saying that as we get into the topic).
00:06:45	So the person that we’re talking about today is none other than Ruth. I know y'all wasn't ready for that because when we talk about Ruth, we always talk about Boaz. Ruth and Boaz. The poster child of you know like happy couples and singles’ ministries because every time I've heard a singles’ ministry, they're telling us to wait on our Boaz and all of this stuff. And it gets into this whole like romance or the romantic idea of Ruth and Boaz, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. Boaz isn't even important in the aspect of Ruth’s story that we're going to talk about right now.
00:07:26	So Ruth is an important person in the Bible. How do I know this? I know this because Ruth is one of two women in the Bible that have an entire book named after them,[3] and the entire story is about them. It's not many women in the Bible that can say that. So we know they’re important because people took the time to talk about them, and I mean that was a big deal! On top of that, Ruth is one of four women named in the lineage of Jesus. The lineages in the Bible are almost solely patriarchal. It's all about the men, you know, this person begat that person begat that person, and it’s all men all the way down. They don't typically take time to talk about the women in the lineage, and so the fact that Ruth is called out and mentioned in that lineage also speaks about her importance and her significance. And I'm saying that in the terminology that significance and importance that there are things that we are meant to learn from Ruth; there is something about her story that is important and relevant to us today.
00:08:44	I found the most relevant part of her story particularly for the conversation we're about to have, at the very beginning of Ruth. So in the beginning of Ruth, we find out about this family that is fleeing Israel, specifically Judah, I think. They're fleeing this area because there's a famine, and they're trying to go to a place that has more food, more opportunities—Y’all know the deal. We still have this issue in modern-day: people fleeing their countries for better opportunities in other countries; that's basically what happened. So this family goes to Moab in search of safety, stability, security, etc. It's a man, his wife, and their two sons. While they're in Moab, the man dies and the two sons take wives that are Moabites. One of these women is Ruth, and eventually both of these men die, as well. But Ruth and the other woman do not have children.
00:09:51	Now if Naomi, who was the woman—the mother—if she had had another son, then there could have been a levirate marriage and one of the two women could have married the other son and tried to have children, which would have continued the lineage, yada yada yada. But there was no other son. So at this point, Naomi can't really do anything for these two women and there's nothing left for them. So Naomi tells them to go back to their respective families and she's planning to go back to Israel. One of the women listens and goes back to her family, but Ruth decide that she's going to stay with her mother-in-law and she makes the decision to go to a foreign land with a foreign people, convert to a foreign religion, because, you know, she was a Moabite, she was pagan, and now she is telling Naomi that Naomi's God will be her God and where she goes she will go.[4]
00:11:00	Like we talkin’ about like she had her mother-in-law's back. She was ride or die, ready to give up everything, sell everything and go. Now, we don't really get the details of this family dynamic, all right. I'm not really sure how close Ruth was with her mother-in-law. Like it says that 10 years passed before you know all of this stuff I guess kind of came out, but it doesn't exactly specify how long Ruth was married to her husband. Like how long did she know Naomi? How... We don't know, like had she already converted to following and worshipping God or was this a spur-of-the-moment thing that happened as she was deciding to follow Naomi back to Israel? We don't really know all of the details, but we do understand that Ruth felt an obligation to take care of this woman.
00:12:04	Naomi was also a widow, but Naomi was not of marriageable age.[5] Like it wasn't that she should go off and get married and find another husband and start having more children. She was not going to be able to do that, and she wasn't going to be able to have anybody that would take care of her. And like women couldn't have jobs and things back then. So, what was going to happen to Naomi when she left? And this is probably what Ruth was saying, “Who's going to look after you? Who's going to take care of you? Who's going to pay your bills? Who is going to protect you and provide for you and make sure that, you know, everything is OK?”
00:12:45	Now, Ruth on the other hand, she was younger, which is why Ruth ends up being the one who's gleaning the field and getting food for them. But she was also of marriageable age, which is why she was able to marry Boaz, and then she could secure finance and the well-being of both her and her mother-in-law, and that's obviously, you know the story, that's how things play out. But Ruth had enough sense to know that she… Even though like legally she didn't have an obligation to this woman, morally, she felt like she did have some sort of obligation to her.
00:13:28	So let me switch gears a little bit to kind of pull in how I think this relates today and how this relates to me specifically, and what I've been I guess asking myself for the past year. Last year in May, life got really crazy. So at the beginning of May, one of my uncles died. Two weeks later another uncle died. And about a week later my great aunt died. Then at the end of the summer, in August one of my high school classmates was given like a two-week prognosis to live, maybe it was 3 weeks... It was weeks, OK. It was a very short amount of time. And so basically over the course of you know 4/5 months, like 4 people that I knew died. And I realized a lot of things over the course of those couple of months.
00:14:44	The first thing I realized is that I come from a very old family, and I don't mean old like old money, ‘cause we ain't got no money. I mean old like there are extreme age gaps between generations. So my parents are... I mean my dad is almost 70; he ain't there yet, but he's getting really close and my dad is the baby in his family. OK, so I'm giving you an idea of the age of my aunts and uncles, and so when all of these people in my family died back to back like this, I realize that these people are aging and I'm not there. Now, one of the reasons that I live in South Florida and not in California is because I did have enough sense to know that I didn't want to live that far away from my family. I can fly to my family in about an hour. I can drive to my family in about 11 hours. And I wanted to be in the position where if something were to happen I could get to my family with fairly reasonable time. OK? And you know California is it out. But for the field that I work in California is like primetime. That's where all the computer science jobs are California, Seattle, even some in Texas and in Arizona. You know, maybe New York, but all of these places that are tremendously further away from home than I am now.
00:16:35	There really aren't any jobs in my field at home. And the ones that are, are for less-experienced— I don't really know how to explain it but they're definitely not going to pay what it's worth, I guess. So it's basically like, I have a PhD in computer science, the jobs that I could find at home are the jobs you could probably get without having a degree at all, or all you need is a bachelor's, and they're not going to pay you for the fact that you have a PhD, so I might as well not have gone and gotten it type of a situation—which is one of the reasons why I'm not home. But as all of this was happening I was like oh my goodness like, “What... What would I do if I needed to be there for my parents?” Like would I quit my job here? Would I sell everything I have down here and go back home?
00:17:38	And it's an interesting thing for me to think about when I look at Ruth. Ruth went to a foreign land. The Israelites were not the most friendly when it came to welcoming foreigners. Now, yeah ok, we know they used to intermingle with people even though they wasn't supposed to, and they got into a whole lot of things. The Israelite men loved them some non-Israelite women. Like it was a thing, OK. But just because you are allowing somebody to participate in your society or marry into your society, does not mean these biases that you've been taught just disappear.
00:18:22	We see this in the New Testament.[6] Peter was, you know, adamant.[7] There were a lot of people were like “Nah, we're not really here for the Gentiles, like we don't talk to Gentiles.” When Jesus went and talked to the Samaritan woman, people were looking like “What are you doing? You're not supposed to talk to her. Like she's not, she's not one of us.”
00:18:40	And the same thing we can see that in today's society. How many white women have married black men in have said mildly racist things about their black daughter's hair? And you know what it doesn't even have to be a white woman. I remember distinctly, I was in high school, I think—middle school? Probably middle school—and I went to a pool with my aunt and my uncle. My aunt by marriage, my uncle by blood; my aunt is Vietnamese. We went to a pool, so obviously my hair got wet. And for those of y’all who know me, this is when my hair was relaxed, OK. This is not all natural Shiree, so my hair wasn't even in full affect, y’all. This is baby curls at this point, and when she saw my hair, the first thing out of her mouth was “Oh I'm glad that [insert her daughter's name]’s hair didn't come out like that, or isn't like that.” And I don't think she meant harm when she said it, but like this is what I mean by you can marry into people and you can... She doesn't actively hate black people, but the things that you've been taught, the things, the systematic, you know, ideas, you know, beauty standards, what you expect, cultural norms, they are still programmed in your mind, and so like subconsciously what you're thinking is that you don't… You're glad your daughter is not really black, like she only kind of black. Like that's basically what you just said to me.
00:20:36	I imagine that's the same kind of thing Ruth stepped into. For anybody listening that’s a minority, you know what it's like to be the only, or you know the oddball in the space of the majority— particularly if it's a hostile environment, where you're seen as an inferior person, whether it's because you're a woman, because you're black, because you're Asian because, you know, whatever, and that's not the best feeling. So the fact that Ruth was willing to go through that says a lot, a lot about her commitment to Naomi. I have to ask myself, like you know, Ruth at most knew Naomi for like 10 years. My momma birthed me. My dad, you know that's been my dad forever. Like we talking about almost 31 years I've known these people! It should not be hard for me to leave where I am now and go where my parents are at the drop of a hat because they need me, because that is my responsibility.
00:21:45	And so, I mean it's just something that... I'm not going to lie that's not what I want to do. And I have my fingers crossed... Y'all my grandmother was 92 when she passed away. She was still in her full, right mind. She was living at home by herself, cooking, cleaning, doing her own thing. I hope both of my parents are like that. I wish them great longevity, and great health into very very old ages, but I also realize that I have to start thinking about the fact that there may be a time where I do have to go home to help out. Even if it's not for my parents but for other members of the family, ‘cause I have a large family, and this is what we're supposed to do, is take care of each other.
00:22:39	Photocredit: ShutterStock/Monkey Business Images So generally speaking I don't go home that often. The last time I went home was in August. Like I said earlier in the podcast one of my friends from high school actually had cancer and she passed away in the fall—and actually I think it might have been September when I went home. Y'all don't quote me on dates, OK, it was in the fall. And when I found out that she had been given like a final date, I was upset because she was a really nice person. I thought she was cool, we got along, excetera excetera, but I was also concerned for a mutual friend that we had. So the other friend was way closer to her than I was, but I was closer to the other friend than I was to her. I don't know if that makes any sense, but basically I was concerned for how this other friend was going to take the death of this friend. And that friend was in her last trimester of pregnancy, and so she was, you know, she was dealing with a lot of things herself. She could not travel, and like I said about this whole West Coast situation she lives on the West Coast and she was not able to come to her friend. I know she would have given anything to be there but she could not. And I happened to be in the middle of planning to go home anyway so I was like okay I'm going to go, and I'm going to go see her. And while I was doing this, you know obviously this was a short-term visit, like I'm just going, you know, to tell her that I'm thinking about her to give her a hug for the friend that can't come, and to just be there. But when I was there, I learned so many things that I did not know. Like for instance, the fact that her father who actually worked with my father, he had retired, her mother had retired. They quit their jobs to travel to take care of her, because you know she was going to different hospitals and her husband works, and just all these things. Like the things that they gave up to take care of her.
00:25:08	And I started thinking about all of the ways that we as people try to help each other, or try to take care of our family members. Another instance of this is when the recession hit in the early 2000s, they found that black families were hit harder than other families, but it wasn't just systematic racism that played into this. There was also the fact that black families were more likely to try to help family members. If there are two brothers, one brother gets laid off, one brother still has a job. The brother that still had a job was trying to support the brother that didn't have a job. So instead of one home struggling, both homes were struggling, because they were trying to redistribute the money to keep both people afloat. So both people were taking a hit.
00:25:59	And to be honest, that’s how it's supposed to be. Like, sometimes it feels like we should just cut off the dead weight, and pull ourselves up. And some people will tell you that. But one of the things that I've really been understanding for myself and reminding myself is that I am not here to be Dr. Shiree Hughes, the computer scientist with the coolest job, getting the mega paycheck. Like if I get to do that that's great, but God put me here for some totally different responsibility, and He has asked me to have his children's back. And he gave me one particular group of His children, and that is a family that I am supposed to be there for. No matter the situation, I am supposed to be there for my parents. I am supposed to be there for my cousins or whatever the case may be. Whatever family member. Like I am the first line of defense being there, like I said, for my parents.
00:27:08	And that transcends some of the more selfish ideas that I may have. So I, you know, like I said it's hard, ‘cause you're like “I want to go out and see the world. I want to travel. I don't want to be cooped up in this small town where everybody is related to me, and you know, they have very, very few vegetarian options for food.” But the fact is, if the time came, would I sell everything and go home to be that rock for my parents? And I think that if Ruth can go into a foreign country that would have been hostile to her, change religions, and you know struggle for a while—’cause she didn't know what was going to happen when they got there. If she can do that, then I can move cities. Like it's not that big of a deal. It really isn't. Like I can take a job that is quote-unquote below my paygrade, and make less money, and deal with it. Like… Sometimes we have to swallow our pride. And it's a lot harder to do than it is to say, but it's something I've been thinking about and it's something that I think we should all think about in our lives.
00:28:33	Where is God calling you to be? Who is he calling you to be there for? And if you had to fly across the world to be there for that person, would you drop everything and go

Footnotes and References

1. So for some reason as I was talking Set it Off popped into my mind and that’s why I said this
2. Matthew 19:21
3. Esther is the other
4. Ruth 1:16-17
5. Context! I meant for the time period and in the eyes of society. Even today the perceived value of women decreases as we age. However, as a never-been-married 30 year old, you know I don’t subscribe to the idea that someone is “too old” to be married.
6. This being the bias against non-Israelites
7. Reference to Acts 10, where God has to explain to Peter that he should receive Gentiles

Most Likely to be A Hallmark Movie

Can you imagine the responsibility of being queen of a nation? Royals are groomed their whole life for this responsibility. So what happens when a commoner is elevated to that station? God placed us, commoners, in the heart of His kingdom, and we too are struggling to adapt in our new role.

Season 1 Episode 18

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits. 1 Peter 2:12 CSB

00:01:14	Hey guys. Welcome back to the PSALMS to God podcast. So you know there are certain movies that have the exact same plot, and the reason they all have the same plot is because there are certain books that all have the same plot—and they're coming from the same source material, basically.
00:01:24	There’s nothing new under the sun. We keep repeating the same stories over and over and over again, with new characters and twists. Like, you know, let's set it on a different planet with aliens or you know what. let's set it in the future. Let's set it in the past. Let's do a gender swap on the characters. Let's make it really rich. Let's make it really poor. Let's make it middle class. Oh, let's tell it with black people. Let’s tell it with white people. Let’s tell it with Asians! Like we're just mixing up random, minute details.
00:02:04	Photocredit: Unsplash.com/Steije Hillewaert We’re telling the same story over and over and over again, but that's okay because there is something about these stories that captivate us. There's something ture in the story that pertains to life that keeps us coming back to that story over and over again, that draws us, that makes us love it. And you know, Hallmark is a master at this. I used to watch the Hallmark Channel all the time when I had cable, and I would watch these movies, particularly around the holidays. They always have these movies—there’s always like some love story and you know there's always a princess involved or prince, and it's basically Cinderella with some new twist to it. And even though I would know exactly what was going to happen in the story and even though, you know, there might be parts of me that are like this is so wrong or you know this isn't right about it or that's not right about it. I'd still watch it. And I'd still be like “Awww! They're so cute, blah blah blah.” And the hopeless romantic in me would just be like so happy to see these two people fall in love, and I would just keep watching—which is why I've probably seen almost all of the Cinderella movies: the whole Cinderella Story series, you know, the live-action Cinderella, the animated Cinderella (there are multiple animated Cinderella, y'all), then you know, there's of course Cinderella with Brandy (that is probably my favorite version of Cinderella), there's Ever After with...I think it's with Drew Barrymore, I don't know. There so many versions of Cinderella, right? And you're like why do we keep telling this story over and over again?
00:03:52	Well guys, the story originates in the Bible, and this is why I think that this particular story, this particular person’s story, would be a Hallmark movie. It would be a hit, because they're already making movies that are basically this plot anyway! And that person is Esther. The Book of Esther is one of two of the only books in the Bible that is named after a woman, and features prominently a woman. So that should already tell you that you need to stop and watch and pay attention, because there's something really serious in this. Women were not highlighted at such a prominent level in the Bible. It was basically a man's world. So for the authors of the Bible to name the book Esther and to spend all of this time talking about Esther’s story and what happened, it should tell you that there's something else here. There's something very important for us to learn from the situation.
00:04:56	Now, from a base point of view, you know, we'll go into like a slight summary of what happens in Esther for those of you who don't remember the story of Esther. The basic overview is like I said a Cinderella story. Esther was an orphan, she was being raised by her uncle—a man named Mordecai—and she was an Israelite who was in Persia or in Babylon. They were under the captivity, so they were basically the lowest caste in society, and she was lower than low because she was an orphan! And during this time, the king has basically a… I don’t wanna say argument, he has a disagreement? Things don't go right with his wife, the queen. Her name is Vashti or Vashti. I'm not really sure how you pronounce it, but I'm calling it Vashti. And in the midst of this argument or this disagreement, he gets rid of her as his wife (and by get rid of her as his wife. And by git rid of, I mean he banishes her, not that he kills her).
00:06:04	And so after he has his first wife banished, he goes on search of a new wife... And in my mind this is like some Bachelor-esque type of thing. He's calling all of the eligible maidens in the kingdom to come—does that sound familiar? That sounds real familiar, y'all—and he has them, and you know he's going through them one by one to figure out which one's going to be his wife. Sounds like a ball where the prince might meet a princess, or you know, The Bachelor. Like I said y'all, this could be on our TV today. So during this, Esther is placed with these women; her her uncle gets her in, and miraculously the king chooses Esther and she becomes the queen of Persia.
00:06:57	Y'all Persia was like the most powerful country, nation, whatever you want to call it, of that time. She went from being an orphan as one of the captives to being the queen of Persia. Like I said, this is golden Hallmark movie type of stuff. This is, you know, epic. So that is the basic story, that is the fluff, but it doesn't stop there, right? And that's why this can't be a Disney movie because there is more and it starts to get the dark.[2] OK. So Esther is becoming a queen but her uncle is basically kind of poking the bear with the king's right-hand man, Haman. Mordecai is like “I'm not bowing to this man. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing that.” He has, I guess from Haman’s point of view, Mordecai has a sense of arrogance, you know. I can’t knock Mordecai for not wanting to bow to this man. I probably wouldn't have wanted to bow to him either. Nonetheless, Mordecai knew that this was going to make him mad and he did it anyway.
00:08:07	So after some interactions, some altercations between these two, Haman decides that he wants all of the Jews killed—common theme in the Bible—so he goes to the king and get a decree made to kill all of the Israelites, which is a problem, obviously. So Mordecai enlists the help of Esther to change the king's mind, or rather to get a new decree put out that would prevent all of the Israelites from being murdered. And of course Esther is very nervous about this because even though she has become the queen, she is not sovereign, OK. She can't just go approach the king whenever she wants to. She can't just do whatever she wants to do. She has to ask to be, to approach him. She has to get permission and then she has to ask for this favor and hope that he will grant her favor.
00:09:10	There is so much underneath the surface of this story. Obviously we know that it ends with a happy note. Esther is successful in her mission; she's able to get the Israelites spared, everything turns out well, and they all lived happily ever after. But there's so much symbolism in it like it made me feel like I was reading a book for AP Lit or something, and again that's what we love about this story, about the movies that are made in this vein, in the same plot line. There's so much that we can dig into and that's what keeps us coming back to it, and so I wanted to go into some of these other points about Esther and how they then relate to us today.
00:10:06	So first of all, yeah I just went over the overview what happens in Esther, but Esther is actually an allegory. We can separate out everything into symbolism, and turn Esther into the gospel. So in the Bible if you follow along throughout each book, each chapter, the Bible uses symbolism and it has a reoccurring symbols. One of those symbols is the fact that a woman symbolizes the church. There are countless versus—I'll link some in the transcript for those who a curious—but there are countless examples where God references the church as a woman.[3] The most common being the Bride of Christ, right. So if we look at the story of Esther and we think of women as churches, you have Vashti, who was the first queen, as one church, and Esther who is the new queen as another church. And of course because the church is the Bride of Christ, then we can see the king as God or as Christ.
00:11:23	We’ll go into go what each of these symbols mean, I just want to kind of pull out the symbols before I start tying them together. Then if you also look, there is a huge number of sevens if you go into Esther, particularly at the very beginning, in Esther 1 and Esther 2, and you start looking at the number seven... Y'all know seven shows up everywhere OK. Especially if you get into Revelation. There are seven plagues. There’s seven trumpets. There’s seven churches. There’s seven candlesticks. It’s sevens, lots of sevens. Well, when you go into the beginning of Esther, the queen has seven people come to her to request her presence. There are seven princes at the party that the king is hosting. The king takes Esther as his wife in his seventh year as reigning as the king, and Esther is given seven maids to look after her once she becomes queen, OK. That's a lot of sevens y'all. There there's clearly significance to the sevens.
00:12:34	So when I was researching this, I was watching sermons and I was reading articles and people were trying to link up what these sevens meant in terms of the grand scheme of things. I'm not really sure, you know, all of the things I'll link some of them in a transcript. I don't want to get into everything because I don't... I don't have a full understanding and a full grip on those things to really come...to do justice to it is what I mean.
00:13:06	But one of the things that I thought was really interesting is the fact that Esther is made the queen in the seventh year of the king’s reign. When you think about time and the number seven remember God created the world in seven days. Six days He created things, and on the seventh day He rested, and then He hallowed that seventh day as the Sabbath. And if you follow prophecy and how the calendar worked out and all of these things, you know, within the Old Testament... I mean we know about the seventh day Sabbath, most people know that, but God also talked about the seven-year Sabbath, there was also like the Jubilee—the Year of Jubilee, which was seven seven-year Sabbaths. So like the 49th year marked the Jubilee year. And so there were all of these these types of seven, and if you study in Revelation and prophecy and they talk about the Sabbath Millennium, because they're supposed to be a millennium after Christ comes back where there's just peace before things start going, before the punishments really start getting dictated. And so people call it the seventh Millennium or the Sabbath Millennium.
00:14:36	And so I think it's interesting because women always represent the church in the Bible or a woman and we have two women. We have Vashti and Esther. Vashti represents the old church; Esther represents the new church. The old church was disobedient they had trouble following God. They had trouble keeping faith, they were not loyal, so when God called to them and said come to me, they refused to come. This is Israel, OK. Israel was called to be the chosen people and they were given favor from the King, but they chose to do their own thing. They chose to chase after pagan gods and goddesses, and to move in their own time and do their own thing. Kind of how Vashti did, but God didn’t kill them, He just sent them away, just like the king just just send Vashti away. And then in the seventh year, in the Millennium when Jesus comes back to take His bride back, He will be taking the real Church, the queen, the new church, which would be Esther. Esther is the loyal queen, who accepted the king’s call who came when he asked of her, and that is how the final church is. It's not just the Israelites, it's made up of all the people who respond to the call of God, all of the people who have chosen to be loyal to God and have chosen to follow his commands.
00:16:24	And I think, you know, obviously that is a wonderful and beautiful underlying message that we can see, but then there is more. There is always more guys. So when we think about Esther becoming the queen, like I said there's a whole notion of it being the church and the new church and all of this, but we can also look at it in reference to us today. Now, I'm doubtful that I'm going to randomly meet somebody and suddenly become the queen of some crazy powerful nation, to be honest, I don't want that to happen; that's too much responsibility. But speaking of responsibility, each and every one of us is called to do something. We are called to spread the gospel. We are called to do whatever service it is that God has for us. For you it might be helping, you might be ministering to the homeless or you might be ministering to kids in your class. You may be a teacher and ministering to your class is what you were put here for. Maybe you are a electrician and maybe it's just ministering to people that you are fixing the electricity in their house. It could be absolutely anything, but God has put you in a certain place for a specific reason, and when we get in that place it is our duty to fulfill that purpose and to do whatever it is that God has called us to do.
00:17:59	In Esther's case, she was put in the position of queen because she had access to the king. She is the only person who could approach the king and save her people. She was the only person, and that was a terrifying thing, because she could have been thrown out just like Vashti was. He could have never called her to him. He could have refused to talk to her. He could have gotten mad when she brought it up and had her killed, because he was the king, and she was just an orphan who lucked out and got chosen as the queen. But the fact is she stepped out on faith. Before she did this she prayed, she fasted, and then she went and did what she had to do. She used her position of influence, her position of power to further the plan of God and to save her people. That is what God has called us to do. No matter how big or how small your influence may be, there is something that you can do with your influence to spread the gospel, to protect those who are under the umbrella of the gospel. And sometimes it's scary. Sometimes it's going to take a leap of faith. You might have to fast before you go and ask for this thing or that thing, but at the end what God has ordained will always come to pass, and so if you are doing what God is asked you to do, you will be successful.
00:19:32	I think that that is something to take with you in your everyday journey. Everyday, all day, remembering that Esther was able to do this and she was successful, and that we have that same ability. That you know again blurring this literal historical story and the symbol, the symbolism, the symbology of it is us as the church approaching God the king and asking for favor. We are fortunate that He is calling us to Him, He will say come approach me, tell me what you need, what can I do for you. And we have that ability to go intercede for other people, for ourselves, for the nation, for our leaders, and that is our responsibility, because we are Esther. And again, in a literal sense we have that situation, we have that responsibility in our jobs, in our you know, whatever platform you have Maybe you’re a social media guru; maybe you have a podcast; maybe you have a YouTube channel; maybe you're a pastor; maybe you’re a teacher—whatever you're leading some group of people and you have influence. And you're supposed to be using it for the good of the Lord.
00:20:58	So like I said, I feel like there is so much symbolism in The Book of Esther. I only scraped the surface. I wrote a whole post about this a while back, I will link that in the transcript for people who want to go even further into how all of this stuff plays out,[4] but I really think that there's so many layers to the story. And like I said, is at his heart is a story that we love to hear over and over and over again, because all of these aspects that I've been talking about talk of direct truths from God. They speak to our purpose and what we're supposed to do and how God's world operates in general. And I think that's why we love it, at least that's why I love it and I never get tired of the story, which is why this book has become one of my favorite books in the Bible.
00:21:57	So I think you guys should read it. I think you guys should apply it to your day-to-day life. And I hope that you also think it's pretty awesome. And I hope that I'm not the only person that would totally watch this as a movie provided Hollywood doesn't screw it up, which we know they would. Let me not even... Yeah, it was nice while it lasted... Anyway check out the transcript at www.psalmstogod.com/hallmark. Don't forget to subscribe and like, and I'll see you next time

Footnotes and References

1. Ecclesiastes 1:9
2. Ok, so the party in the beginning, banishing the queen, and the fact that the king probably slept with all the women he was given as options, probably disqualified it from Disney well before this chain of events.
3. 2 Corinthians 11:2; Galatians 4:21-31; Jeremiah 6:2
4. Ree Hughes. "The Allegory of Esther”. PSALMS to God. April 29, 2017

Most Likely to Step Out On Faith

Your instinct is telling you one thing, but your mind is trying to rationalize everything, so it's telling you the opposite. Can you ever trust your gut feeling if you don't truly believe in the power of Christ?

Season 1 Episode 16

⁹The heart is more deceitful than anything else,
and incurable—who can understand it?
¹⁰I, the Lord, examine the mind,
I test the heart
to give to each according to his way,
according to what his actions deserve.Jeremiah 17:9-10 CSB

00:01:15	Hey guys! Welcome back to the PSALMS to God podcast. Today we are back to the Yearbook Superlatives Series, and I want to talk about the person that is Most like to Step Out on Faith. Stepping out on faith is hard. It basically means that we have no idea what's going on. It probably seems a little illogical. It's not something that we necessarily want or desire, but it's something that we think God desires and God has called us to do. And so we do it, even though we don't necessarily know what the plan is. We don't know how it's going to work out. We just do it. And there's a person in the Bible that—well, OK there's a lot of people in the Bible who clearly exemplify this type of behavior, but in the past week or so I've been talking to some of my friends, we've been talking about a lot of things and this one person has been on my mind because of the nature of the conversations we've been having. And so I wanted to talk about this person and how it relates to our lives today.
00:02:30	Before I go into talking about the person and what they did and what their life was about, I really wanted to stop and talk about why I chose Jeremiah 17:9-10 to start off this discussion. So part of why I'm doing this particular episode, and why I want to talk about this person, comes down to one of the things that I personally struggle with, and that is trusting in my own self—which I don't know if that's really how I want to word it because we're not supposed to trust in ourselves, we're supposed to trust in God. You know, lean not unto your own understanding but trust in the wisdom of God. That's from Proverbs, I think it's from Proverbs 3; not really sure which verses in Proverbs 3.[1] But basically, there are things that we should be able to trust. I should be able to trust in my knowledge of God, that I know God. I should be able to trust in my knowledge of scripture, because I should know the scriptures, and one of the things that I think, personally for me, is that I think I have the gift of discernment.[2]
00:03:47	I... All my life I have been really, really accurate at predicting the character of people or the nature of situations. My first instincts are almost always right. I can't really think of a scenario, right now, where my instinct has been saying "trust this person," and they were untrustworthy or said "don't trust this person," and they've actually turned out to be trustworthy. Pretty much every time&dmdash;I remember being a kid—there were, you know, all of these scams and stuff that people were bringing up. People trying to, you know, weasel their way into property to get money and stuff from our family, and you know, I was like 10, you know, I'm 8/10/11, and when these people would come to the house, you know, after they left I would tell my dad or my mom or my grandfather, whoever I had met these people with, I'd be like "I don't trust them. I think they were lying the whole time," and you know, a couple of days later, a week later, whenever things would come out, the truth was they were lying. And so I was like clearly I have some sort of radar for this, and I think that that would boil down to the Spirit of discernment.
00:05:09	But I wish I could say that I always follow through on that, but a lot of times I'm like "Shiree maybe you're being judgmental, you shouldn't think that. You don't know that person; they could be a really nice person." And a lot of times, I second-guessed whether my instinct is correct or not. And I think some of that is self-taught—err, not self-taught but, you know, people—because it started when I was a kid—people would say things like, "Oh you're negative. Oh, you know, you don't trust people. You have trust issues." And so instead of people saying "Oh I think you have the Spirit of discernment, you should trust what The Spirit is telling you," I was more so told "you're paranoid," or something like that. And so I think in that I learned to distrust my own instinct.
00:06:05	And it even boiled over into school. So when I was taking tests, particularly like multiple choice tests, I would always think of the right answer first, and then when I would go back and check the test, and I would go back over my work, I would second-guess my own answers. I would be able to rationalize and talk myself out of the first answer and think that something else was the right answer, and then I would try to give that answer, which would inevitably be the wrong answer. So when I would get my test back, I could see, you know, the faint pencil markings where I had erased the correct answer, but I had marked the wrong answer and I'd get the question wrong. And that's not how I want to live for God. I don't want to be standing before God and He's like "You know, I know that you thought about doing XYZ but you talked yourself out of it and did ABC, but you were supposed to do XYZ, and you didn't do it." That is not—you know it's one thing to fail, you know, an English test, I'm not trying to fail God's test.
00:07:18	I want to be able to step out on faith and do what God is actually telling me to do. And so that is one of the motivations I had for the episode. So the reason the person that I am going to talk about came to mind is because me and my friends have been talking a lot about dating lately, and if you're single, you know that dating in 2019 is hard. It is hard. It is rough, and it is crazy. And you know who else had a crazy experience in the world of love? Hosea. Hosea is or was a prophet from the Northern Kingdom of Israel. For those who are a little rusty on your history of Israel—ancient Israel not modern Israel—in ancient Israel they had the united kingdom, which was ruled first by Saul, then by David, then by Solomon. After Solomon's reign, when Solomon's son took over, there was a split, and they had the southern kingdom—which was Judah, which had the temple and had Jerusalem, and was continued to be ruled by the lineage of David—and then they have the northern kingdom—which is often referred to as Israel or Ephraim, or eventually it becomes Samaria. And it was ruled by other kings, and they basically were in apostasy. They were kind of doing sin the whole time. None of their kings were particularly good kings, but then they eventually fell to Assyria—and this is where we get the lost tribes of Israel, because there were about 10 tribes that were living in the northern kingdom that once they got captive by Assyria, they never really returned and regain their identity as Israel.
00:09:28	So Hosea started to minister and prophesy slightly after the reign of one of their, I guess, biggest rulers—or one of their most successful rulers. I'm not really sure how you should classify him, but he started reigning after someone named Zechariah became king, and he basically started ministering. And during his reign, I think... Reign?[3] During his prophecies, basically the Assyrian Empire takes over Israel, and so that's kind of the era that Hosea was prophesying in—right at the collapse of Israel. There was basically chaos. They were changing kings like we change socks, OK. It was just basic chaos, and so Hosea was trying to talk some sense into these people. Clearly they were going astray, and God was trying to use Hosea to make a point to the Israelites. So God told Hosea to do something that I don't think nobody would expect God to tell them to do, and that is to marry a prostitute...
00:10:49	Y'all! God had Hosea marry a prostitute! I know y'all know the saying: you can't turn a you-know-what into a housewife. I know you know the saying. But God told Hosea to do that. The whole point of God telling Hosea to do this was to illustrate the whole concept of the Bride of Christ or the fact that the church is the bride and God is the husband, and it was to illustrate the unconditional love that God has for His people—even though the people were turning away from God—what the Old Testament ultimately refers to as adultery. They were out, you know, consorting with other gods, with pagan gods, with pagan practices—God was still willing to love them. He was still willing to go to them. So even after this woman does all of this stuff, she's still worthy to be the wife of Hosea, and he's still supposed to love her and to treat her well, and to show her back to the state that she was supposed to be and was meant to be in it. And that's a lot. That's a lot to ask of somebody. I don't think anybody really desires someone that has that kind of a past, let alone somebody who might be currently entrapped in that situation.
00:12:31	So one of the things that stood out to me about what Hosea did and what God called Hosea to do versus these conversations I've been having lately with my friends about dating, is that we are not necessarily... We think that we're following what God says but sometimes we're still following our heart. Like I said in the beginning, the heart is deceitful. And it can be a circular thing, because you know the devil will step in and have you thinking this that and the other. It can be really confusing to just simply clear your mind, listen to God, and see whether that's playing this way or that way. It's hard. I can testify to that, but I was sitting and talking to one of my friends. We're talking about dating, and she was saying that, basically, she was saying that she knew that God would not send her a man who had a child to be her husband. She doesn't want a husband who already has children. It was interesting because when she mentioned it that's pretty much when Hosea popped into my head, because I was thinking, I mean obviously the one thing that I think is a definite is that God will not send you somebody else's husband. OK, let's put that out there. God is not going to send you somebody else's husband, or for my gentleman that are listening in, God is not going to send you somebody else's wife. That's... OK. That's fool proof. You can trust on that, but when we got into these other things, I think there are definitely things that we desire of the heart that actually have no merit in what God is trying to do in the grand picture.
00:14:38	And so you know her saying God would not send me a man that already has children, I was like yeah... You know, I would like for God to send me a man that doesn't already have children, and I'm sure you would, too, but I'm not actually convinced that God would not send you that, because what it is is that something we don't want. But just like God used this situation with Hosea to prove a point, both to Hosea and to the nation at large, sometimes our purpose is a lot greater than what we think it is or it's a lot trickier than what we think it is. Sometimes there are these things that we have to go through, these things that we have to accept. So we have certain ideas, certain desires, but the truth is no one is perfect, and everyone has a past. Everyone comes from something, and in the end whatever experience the person that God has for you has been through, has brought them to where they are now. And perhaps for them to be the person that is compatible with you, they may have had to go through XYZ experience, and that experience may not be something that is particularly desirable of your heart—whether it's because of something society has taught us, or is it just because we basically desire a perfect spouse. You can't really be certain.
00:16:20	Photocredit: Unsplash.com/Ian Stauffer And so it was interesting, because like I said, as we were talking about it, I started to think about all of the things that I just had as like a preconceived notion in my mind, and I think this is one of the problems in the church. When people walk into the church, church people can be judgmental. They see somebody that has tattoos, they see somebody that's dressed a certain way. If you attend a Seventh-Day Adventist Church maybe if you see people with jewelry, they feel a certain way—and I didn't even know that was a thing until people started talking to some of my friends at church about their jewelry. It's a whole thing. We'll come back to jewelry in another podcast episode, but people will look at that outward appearance and they will jump to all kinds of conclusions because they have a preconceived notion of what it means to be of God, or to be a Christian, or to be following the Word of God. But there are things in life that are permanent. They're permanent markers of our experiences. You could call them scars, you can call them battle...victory, victory scars? Victory markings, whatever you want to call them, but there are things that happen in our life that shape our walk with Christ, and shape how we become who we are, that cannot be erased. They just exist. That's kind of how tattoos are. If you went out and got a bunch of tattoos when you were 19, they're there. They're going to be there. You could have a whole, you can be tatted from head to toe, and you could have found God years later, days later, whatever. You could have been a believer and just not had a conviction about tattoos when you got the tattoos, whatever that doesn't mean that at the moment that I see you, you are not in a relationship with God, and that you are lost. But that's how a lot of people will treat that person. But none the less, whatever experiences they went through are showing, because you're going to see those tattoos, you're going to see these markings of what they liked at the time that they got the marking or what they thought or what they believe.
00:18:48	And that's similar for other experiences that may not be so visually appropriate, visually...I don't know what word I'm looking for there, but basically you could have gone through something, whether you went through a rough time... Whether you had a rough upbringing—those lessons, those treatments, how you view the world, they're going to shape some of how you behave now. They're going to shape how you perceive the world, how you change your actions, and how you react to things. You're going to have, I don't even know... There's just so many examples that can be given, but all of these things, ultimately are things that God had you go through to make you who you are. So when I look back, you know, there are things that I'm not necessarily proud of that I've done or said, and then there are things that I look back on that I'm like you know I had to go to that to be where I am now. I had to experience that to be who I am now, and so while my journey may be tame compared to other people, some people may have had to go through more extreme trials and tribulations. So I just think it's interesting that when we meet people, we can see these things, and it can alter our perception of them.
00:20:32	And one of the things that I've really clung to as an adult—probably in my mid-twenties I started to realize that a lot of times when were saying certain things, like the example of my friends saying that she didn't think that God would send her a husband who already has a child, a lot of times we're looking at our past and seeing how similar our past is to the other person's past. And we're looking for someone who has been demonstrating a past that is similar to ours to look for our future. And so we're looking to try to see the future, but the problem is just because we walked the same walk from the time we were children until the time we were in our twenties, does not mean we're going to continue to walk the same walk. Because you may not have any children... So for instance, keeping that theme and that topic, I have male friends who don't have any kids. They never been married, but they don't necessarily believe in God. That's yeah, OK, so we came from the same place: we both don't have kids. This is a desirable thing. You haven't necessarily been out here being reckless and unsafe, but we're not going in the same direction. We have no desire to go in the same direction, and that's not to say that just because someone does or doesn't have kids that you can tell the direction they're going in, I'm just saying that we have to be more focused on where we're going, if we're going in the same direction, than where we came from. I think where we came from is important, and it does have some bearing on where we're going, but that's not the most important thing, and I think it is, that is a crucial component to stepping out on faith, because if Hosea had looked at Gomer, which is who became his wife, if he had looked at her behavior and saw that she was a prostitute and that she had been reckless and doing all of these things, he would not have pursued her.
00:23:03	Let's think about this: yes, there are plenty of men out here who have no problem dating somebody who has slept with everybody and their mama, because they don't care. Or they just have different ideas about life, but when you picture a godly man, when you a picture a man who is for instance a preacher, or somebody who is, you know, leading a ministry, the men that you think are the most desirable men in the church, the ones who have their life together, they are steeped in the Word of God, you do not picture them dating a prostitute—some girl that they met at the club, who was tooted up, dress all up her behind, everything showing. That's not who you picture them marrying. And these are things that you know we as women, we be sitting here like, "Wait a minute! Here I am trying to be a nice godly woman. I'm trying to imitate the Proverbs 31 Woman out here. They out here marrying a prostitute!" You would be appalled, and you would feel some type of way. But that's exactly what God told Hosea to do.
00:24:21	Now, I think it's slightly different in the context of Hosea being a godly man and, Gomer being a "lost woman," because the man is supposed to be the head of the household. His job was to lead her to Christ, that again is probably a lot longer of a topic than can we have to go into right now, but I think it might be slightly different in the context of a woman and a man if the roles are reversed. But in the New Testament, there are passages that talk about if people are married and their spouse is not a believer and they are a believer, and it being on the believer to win the spouse over, and that their behavior may influence the spouse. And it talks about women influencing their husband and showing their husband the love of God through their walk, as well.[4] So I don't think it's necessarily impossible that God would have you in a situation that is not what you expected and that you would have to step out on faith in dealing with that situation. Now, that's not to say that you should be reckless and just be getting any ol' trifling person because you think that God is trying to lead you to convert them, or to make that change in their life. What I'm talking about is, like I said in the beginning, of discernment and instinct.
00:25:59	Do not let the world and their perception of people talk you out of your instinct. That is my whole point. There are things that God does that we don't expect. And some of the things that God does, we already know and we already expect it, and so we have to trust our instinct. We have to trust the voice of the Holy Spirit. So once you start communing with God, once you start that relationship, you're praying. You're reading the word. You're walking with God on a consistent basis. You have to get to the point where you can hear His voice and trust what He is saying, because if He comes to you with something like this, then that's what He comes to you with. And if the devil comes to you with something like this, you need to know the difference. And that is where things get a little tricky, and that is the thing that I want us to all be mindful of as we go out in the world and pursue relationships—whether they are romantic relationships, friendships, professional relationships, familial relationships, all types of relationships—let us be mindful of what our role is in that relationship and what God is calling us to do in the lives of those around us.
00:27:23	Thank you guys for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I hope you learned something. I definitely learned some things. The transcript for this particular episode is on the website www.psalmstogod.com/SteppingOutOnFaith. Thank you guys once again! I will see you next time.

Footnotes and References

1. Proverbs 3:5-7
2. If that is the gift I have, I should be able to trust in that as well.
3. By reigning I definitely meant Hosea started ministering. My brain was suck on kings it seems.
4. 1 Corinthians 7:10-16

Most Popular Guy

Back in the day it was about popularity; now it's about being an "influencer." Which person from the Bible do you think embodies this, and what could we learn from him/her?

Season 1 Episode 11

²⁵Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. ²⁶It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, ²⁷and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave; ²⁸just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”Matthew 20:25-28 CSB

00:01:26	Hey guys! Welcome back to the PSALMS to God podcast. So, today's superlative is "Most Popular Guy." I think that popularity is in the eye of the beholder, to be honest, but it's something that I feel like we've all dealt with. We've all probably desired. In hindsight, is kind of fuzzy on how to define popularity. Today's culture makes it a lot easier because you have things like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Social media makes it really easy to keep a count of how many people are following you, how many people liked your posts and your tweets and your thoughts and things. And so, it's really easy to quantify who is quote-unquote the coolest kid at the school, or who is the coolest person in your office, or amongst your friend group, or whatever, because that person may have tens of thousands of followers, and you may only have two.
00:02:35	And so, there's a much easier way to quantify, I guess, popularity, but at the same time, in today's society, people like things absent-mindedly. It doesn't mean they actually like the person, and people follow people absentmindedly. It doesn't—they can turn on people. We see this all the time, and cyberbullying is real. And so, I think that even still, you still kind of have this vagueness about what it means to be popular. And even then, there is the question of what traits do people have that give them this popularity.
00:03:28	To be real, I think the popularity and leadership kind of go hand-in-hand; they have some similarities to them, because the people who become the most popular are typically influencers. They're going to be the people that people are trying to imitate, that they are looking up to, that they're modeling themselves after. Whether that's a celebrity, whether that's somebody at school, whether that's your mentor at work, you're definitely going to try to imitate the people that you think are quote-unquote popular, or cool, or however you want to phrase it. And so there is a leadership aspect to that, as well. Because by nature of being well-received and well-liked, you also have the platform that allows you to lead, to shape, to mold people.
00:04:27	And in seeing that, I definitely wanted to look to the Bible for who I thought was the most popular, or the best leader&mdahs;I think they go hand-in-hand, as I said. And so given that, you probably can already guess who I would say, but I gave that superlative to David. King David is probably the most famous king of Israel, for multiple reasons—some of them good, some of them bad. But even to this day, if you look at the flag of Israel, it has the Star of David—we could probably do a whole 'nother podcast about the Star of David, 'cause I read some very interesting things about the Star of David—we're going to stay focused, and we're going to talk about the man David.
00:05:22	And so, like I said, probably the most famous king that Israel had, and I think that there are three specific traits that David shows that I think you would find in pretty much anybody in our society who is considered popular, well liked, well received, an influencer/celebrity, however you want to phrase that. I think these people would have these three traits, and I think that whether we are striving to be popular and have tons and tons of followers on social media or tons and tons of friends, or whether we moved on past that phase in our life, I think these three traits are still traits that we should be imitating and fulfilling as followers of Christ, because we are also called to be leaders and influencers, and basically ambassadors, for the kingdom of God.
00:06:31	So without further ado, the first trait is that of confidence or fearlessness. One of the first things that we learn about David is that even though he was too young to join the Army, and to go off to battle, he was still eager to play his part and to do his role or to be useful in the time of battle. So David goes, and I believe he takes food to his brothers. He takes something to his brothers.[2] When he gets there, he finds that everybody is sitting around scared to fight this giant named Goliath. And you know this could probably [be] embarrassing, because Israel is the great Israel. God is fighting their battles; they have come out of Egypt; they have taken the promised land; and now they're afraid to have a one-on-one battle instead of having a mass slaughter, because they don't actually believe that God will handle their battle.
00:07:38	But David volunteers to do this. He's not even old enough to be in the Army.[3] so per Israel's laws he had to have been less than 20. He's not necessarily described as a ginormous—I mean he was probably of decent stature for what we would consider today, but Goliath is a giant! We're not talking about taking on some guy the same size as you, the same weight... We're talking about this massive giant, and David's just like, "yeah I'll do it, let's go. I have full confidence that God has got this battle in His Hands, and that God has already won the victory. All I have to do is let God use me."
00:08:28	He was fearless. He was not afraid to take a risk. He wasn't worried about failing, and this is what we need in our life, everyday. We have so many decisions to make, and when we second guess what God is telling us to do, and when we second guess ourselves. we fall short. You know, if you don't give it a hundred and ten, if you don't give it your all, it's not going to work. You can't half do something and expect a great and grand result. An example is, if you wanted to start a business—you can't half invest in your business, and expect the business to take off. You have to go into it 100% fully committed, and that's scary because it's a risk. You don't know if it's going to succeed. But David knew that God had his back, and so he was not afraid. He had full confidence and no fear going into that battle, and that is why we remember him today.[4]
00:09:32	So the second trait that David has that I think we all need is humility. So fairly early in the narrative that we learn about David, we see that Samuel columns and anoints David to be the next king. Now, if somebody told me that I was about to be the new queen of the United States—we don't really operate like that, but pretend that we were and that we did and that being queen meant something—you know, you might start feeling a way about yourself. You might be like "I don't have to go to work. I don't have to put up with your foolishness. You know what? The first order of business when I become queen is to get rid of you, and you, and put you in jail. And to get you back for what you did." It's very easy for us to let those kinds of positions and powers dictate our actions and to corrupt us. You know what they say, "absolute power corrupts absolutely,"[5] and it's very easy to stray into that.
00:10:40	We see that just with Saul. Saul lost his mind, but David does not do that. David doesn't start boasting. He doesn't start bragging, and he doesn't start acting out, and above his station. In fact, David ends up as a servant to Saul and to Saul's family, and he serves them faithfully and loyally. In fact, when Saul freaks out and descends into madness, and even when Saul is trying to kill David, David does not retaliate and kill Saul. He basically just fleas to save his own life. He doesn't really fight back or push back. He still gives his loyalty to Saul as long as Saul is alive as king. He makes friends with Saul's kids, and like I said, he just acts like a humble person. And I think that's very important&mdashto remain humble and not to let success or fame, or whatever you have, to get in the way of being a decent person and treating everybody with respect and not getting ahead of yourself, is what I'm trying to say.
00:11:56	The final trait that I want to point out goes along with one of David's most famous acts, that you know, he probably wishes we would stop talking about because he did so many other things that were great, but we typically remember David by this one act that was not so great. And the third trait that I'm talking about is, being able to admit your mistakes and pay the consequences and make amends for your mistakes. So of course you know that the situation I'm talking about is that David committed adultery with Bathsheba. Not only did he commit adultery, but then he turned around and had her husband murdered. So obviously on the onset of the issue he didn't look up and say, "oh, I shouldn't have done this, let me repent right now."
00:12:52	He dug himself deeper in the hole, but after all was said and done David does repent of his deeds. And he realizes that he has done some very, very horrible things. It's a genuine repentance, and that's the key. It's not just a fake "oh well I'm sorry I got caught", it is a deep and genuine sorrow for doing something that you had no business doing. We all have a tendency to get caught up in the moment, and we all do things that we should not do. Hopefully, we're not out sleeping with other people spouses and then killing the spouse. That's...let's not do that! But, I think that if you dial down the severity a little bit, you can relate to what David did. In the moment, you know, I've definitely said some things or done some things that I probably shouldn't have done. And then when you get called out for it, you get defensive, and then you do some other things that you shouldn't have done, because it's in the moment; it's still raw, and you're hormonal or your, you know, your brain is just not working the way it should. And after you have some time to cool off and to think about it, you look back and you're like, "what was I thinking! I can't believe I did that. I am embarrassed. I don't deserve anything. Like I just feel so heavy with guilt and sorrow, and you have to take that to God and let God do the forgiving and then you have to forgive yourself.
00:14:35	But the thing is, when you're not popular, when you're not an influencer, when you're not a leader, it's a lot easier to do this in your closet, in your house, in your apartment wherever away from prying eyes. It's a lot easier to just deal with one person and be like "Look, I messed up, I shouldn't have cussed you out. I shouldn't have, you know, done this petty act or whatever," and just let it be between the two of you and God. But when you are in these types of positions, whether it's these celebrities, whether it's popular people Facebook on YouTube on Instagram, whether it's the CEO of a company, or you know somebody that's very popular at school, when all eyes are on you, your repentance is public as well. And you have to—not that it's right for us to judge somebody else, but the truth is in order to stay in that position, you have to convince other people that you are genuinely repentant of your actions, as well. And this ties back into being fearless being confident and being humble, because a lot of times it's pride that keeps us from admitting the truth. It's pride that keeps us from saying "I was wrong." It's Pride that keeps us from reaching out to make amends for something we've done. But David didn't let pride stand in the way of him reconciling with God, and that is the most important thing.
00:16:18	Once you realize that you've made a mistake, you can't go back and fix it. Even if it's&mdahs;like obviously if you kill somebody, you can't bring them back to life, but even if it's just, you said something you shouldn't have said or you know you did something less dramatic, you cannot change the fact that you did it. Even if it's like, say you stole a piece of gum out the candy bin at the gas station. You didn't get caught, so you go back and you put the gum back. OK, yeah no harm no foul, maybe. Maybe you won't go to jail. Maybe the person will never know, but the point is, God knows. You can't change the fact that you actually did that, and if you took a lie detector test and somebody asked had you ever stolen it was still waiver if you said no, because you did steal. Because you've already done it. We can't go back in the past and change things. What we can do is move forward and admit that that was wrong, and decide not to repeat that behavior.
00:17:26	So, I think that that's very important for anybody who's in a position of power, a of position of leadership, a position of influence, to be able to say "Hey I did this, and this was not a good thing to do. I don't know why I did it—or I do know why I did it. This is why I did it, but I should not have done it, and in the future I don't want to continue to do these things." That's the only way to really go about life, but I think that there's something very inspiring when we see people do that. When we see people lower themselves to the point that they can admit their faults, and then watching them rise above that is just a beautiful thing. So I definitely think that these three traits can be found in pretty much anybody you admire, anybody that you would consider popular. I think that they're found in people who are strong leaders and I think they should be found in all of us, as we profess to be followers of Christ, because Christ has called us to be leaders.
00:18:38	I've been reading The Purpose Driven Life with my young adult group at church, and so far, my favorite thing out of the book is a chapter where he talks about—he being Rick Warren, the author of Purpose Driven Life—he talks about the fact that we should think of ourselves as ambassadors to the kingdom of God, not a citizens of whatever country it is that we're in. And so, as ambassadors for the kingdom of God, our responsibility is to show the people who are native to whatever nation we're in—so Earth in general—what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like. So by definition, we're supposed to be influencers. We're supposed to be leaders. We're supposed to be quote-unquote popular—not in the sense of teen movies where everyone likes you, and you get to win homecoming king or queen, but in the sense that people know who you are. People know what you stand for, and people have a desire to be like you, because you're being like Christ and what they really want is to be like Christ!
00:20:01	So I think that as we go through our life and as we go through our day-to-day routines, we should look at our actions and our decisions, and see if we're being confident. Are we being fearless? Are we tackling each situation with the knowledge that God has already won the battle? Are we being humble, because God won the battle not us? And it is not behooving—or becoming—of anyone to be prideful. That's one of the first mistakes that we can make. It's definitely a downward spiral from there, so keeping that humility. And then of course, we will mess up, but when we mess up can we admit that we have done wrong? Can we repent? Can we make amends for it? And will we go about our fullest potential to make right what we have wronged. That is what kind of person David is, and that is what kind of person I hope to be, and I will be like that to.
00:21:09	Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode. Don't forget to subscribe. In the meantime you can check out the website and find the transcripts for this particular episode www.psalmstogod.com/mostpopularguy. See you next time.

Footnotes and References

1. 1 Samuel 17
2. 1 Samuel 17:16-18
3. Numbers 1:45
4. Well, that and Bathsheba, but I digress
5. This quote is from John Dalberg Acton